“Train rolls through

Dixie sleeps

Stations so few.”

-Woody Wilson, Railtime, 1903

He dreamed of that darned hobo song that his white workers often sang, about riding the rails across The South; a song passed down by poor travelling white trash for a hundred years gone. He always had hated that song, indicating the willingness of his hired help to up and leave at a moment’s notice as it did. The willpower it took to suppress the dream of that song from repeating in his head brought him to a painful consciousness; the terminus of a terrible involuntary nap.

How Whiff had prayed and strove all the livelong night to see the dawn, to hear the birds greet the sun. His body ached and his head pounded. His mouth was dry, his breath rank, and his jaw sore as anything!

He tried opening his eyes but his face was pressed into the blood-soaked earth, his silk slacks and goatskin loafers surely beyond all repair. But live he did. He would rise this day as the third most prosperous Negro in all of The South, and with a story to write and mail off to some Yankee busybody book publisher.

He felt a presence though, standing beside him; felt the dread of the nearly dead; the seeping fear many a soldier of old must have felt sprawled on a far off morning field after some bloody clash at dusk.

Whiff rolled over on his back and opened his eyes to gaze up into the soft blue morning sky laced by the intertwined branches of the Good Lord’s numberless riverbank trees. The horrid smell hit him as his eyes opened and the knife struck his cheek. Whiff scrambled like a man possessed to resume battle with the fiend that had laid in wait to torment him.

He only got to the seat of his pants, hands propping his fat body up above the gore-soaked earth, when he saw the true nature of the fiend—a nasty carrion bird; buzzard of the banks; a blasted turkey vulture trying to peck out his eyes as crows and others of its kind picked the bodies all around of their soft parts. Three of these hell-birds now craned their necks in irritation at him. He crawled forward like a madman attempting to bowl through their ranks.

“Hell birds!”

A childlike fear grabbed a hold of him when they flapped up and away like turkeys out of hell and the cowardly crows cawed their protest and did likewise. The rustle of their wings had set him nearly to vomit, and to flight, to quit this evil place and leave it far, far behind. He plunged into the weeds and other such undergrowth, stumbling as he ran over rotted branch and fallen trunk. On and on he ran smelling the inviting scent of the river more strongly with every step. Whiff would have done nearly anything to escape that place of death.

His stride was none too graceful in his loafers, and his slacks did endure insult on top of humiliation. He even bounced off of one crumbling mess of a tree and went rolling like a ball—and there he was, on the low slow riverbank. But one pace of grassy weeds and three paces of sandy stone separated him from the purifying force of the river. He chugged across the remaining space and fell face first into the mud-sand shallows and plunged his poor blue-bruised jaw in Mother Nature’s cool water.

Something gnawed at Whiff, some specter of dread, having slept where dead men lay, men nary dead before he hit the ground his own self.

He was cringing on the sandy-mud, his suit ruined, his savaged loafers scraping on the stones, looking into the muddy reflection of a muddy looking man; a man he was proud to be the night before; a man under the light of day who he liked less with every passing moment.

He glared at the sad-eyed fool in the reflection, “Get up and go guard that boy’s body from the birds.”

He nodded to himself and began to rise. His motion was interrupted by a great beating of wings and a noisy cawing and screeching back at The Place of Death. His elbows bent, easing him back into the shallows again.

His gaze never left the muddy face of the sad-eyed fool who once thought himself the luckiest colored man in all The South. The face was rendered less consequential, less solid in the ‘Eye of The Lord’, by the ripples that made it waver before his eyes.

“You are a coward after all Whiff Gleason.”

The reflection seemed hurt, but did not disagree, This is not Big Daddy Gleason looking back at you fool, and it sure in hell is not Uncle Ben Samson.

The reflection than began to shed tears and he lacked the stomach for the seeing of that, so rolled over on his back, letting his pounding head cool in the inches deep river, looking up into a sky alive with crows, gulls, and turkey vultures converging just beyond sight, in the Place of Death, in the lonely clearing beneath The Lonely Tree still hung with a readymade rope. The caw and squabble of the birds, seeming come up from hell to turn a horrible night into a worse morning, pumped tears from him. And so Whiff sobbed like a beaten boy—and beaten he had been as a boy—tears rolling over sad cheeks too plump by half, pooling to sting the gaping beak wound where a turkey from hell had missed its breakfast eyeball.

The Confederate Negro, as rightful ward of the CSA, has the consideration of food, shelter, and legal counsel. If this be not provided by the local municipality, the Negro Bond Association, keeping with the pledge of its members to preserve Negro Society via the protective act of Segregation, shall provide a House of Claim administered by a negro fellow of the NBA.